More David Hart…for the board:

“…if divine agape is generous in another sense, if it is actually charitable by giving way to otherness, by desiring the other dearly enough to give in a way that liberates the other even as it ‘binds’ the other – by desiring the other, that is, as the very impulse of charity, and thereby relieving the other of any debt of pure and disinterested return – then the idea of the gift may yet prove resistant to too astringent an ethical purism…”

“…Love is capable of an epektasis toward the truly desirable, a stretching out that is not a backward speculative return to metaphysical identity or moral withdrawal into subjective probity, but a ‘return’ always to the outwardness of the gift, and ecstasy able to claim the other as beloved and desired in a trinitarian way: possession by way of dispassion, gratification of desire through the discover of another.”

“Honestly, it is difficult to be convinced by a discourse of difference and distance that attempts at the same time to be a discourse of Heracleitean flux, because there is no distance in the flux: all dimensions are consumed before they arise. This is the ‘totality’ in the aleatory: every moment of repetition is a singularity that entirely…contains the shape of the whole, a Leibnizian monad that is no longer in any meaningful sense a ‘perspective’ on the whole, because the whole is a sublime, unmediated, absolute presence. For Christian thought, on the other hand, true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are ‘anticipated’, in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility…It is transcendence, the divine distance, with its analogical scope, that prevents presence from being totality, and this distance is the original ‘thematism’ – the transcendent act of music – that makes real difference possible…”

“One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varies response…forever complete and forever calling forth new intonations, new styles of accomplishment and response. The circular, ‘synthetic’, and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian [and the Dwaynian] infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.”

“…when I use the word ‘theme’ here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The ‘theme’ of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme. The theme is present in all its modifications, for once it is given it is recuperated throughout, not as a return of the Same but as gratitude, as a new giving of the gift, as what is remembered and as what, consequently, is invented.”

“Distance is the gift of trinitarian charity, address and response, regard and donation…”

“When I speak of creation as [divine] expression, however, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of the one and the many as such; the coincidence in Christian thought of the doctrines of the Trinity and of creation ex nihilo renders that question a matter of indifference…While it is certainly desirable to say that in creation no hard division can be drawn between essence and exposition, and even that within the trinitarian perichoresis God is never an indeterminate ground of pure divinity, prior to or apart from the utterance of his Word and breathing forth of his Spirit; still God and world do not constitute between them a single order of content and explication, and so one can properly speak only of ‘analogical expression’ [for Dwayne].”

“Precisely because God does not come to or discover or achieve himself in and through creation but simply declares his glory therein, we find God in and through creation as the generous source and end whose goodness shines upon the surface of every sign. It is this (to Deleuze) contradictory notion of a transcendent origination of being’s expressivity that allows for real difference, a real ‘digressionism’…”

“An ‘expression’ bound entirely to its own immanent force expresses nothing but its own expression [Dwayne] – expresses, that is, precisely nothing, repeats nothing. True expression, though…is possible only if there is that movement that allows it to differ, to be at once a new word and an act of disclosure. There must be an original difference that precedes each finite utterance, that frees each word from every ‘ground’…

[Note: I see NO way to ground the “difference” in creative expression, the “address and response” between creator and creature, the “unpredictability” and display of “inventive” creativity that shall define fully realized creaturely existence of which Hart speaks except in the creature’s free determination in “elaborating” upon the divine “themes” that God provides. ]

And my favorite:

“It may be so, as Michel de Certeau asserts, that Christ offers ‘a style of existence that ‘allows’ for a certain kind of creativity and that opens a new series of experiences’….”

[Certeau’s article is in French so I can’t read it. But given the context, my guess is that he views our true ‘self’, our ‘logos’, as the gift of creative capacities to interpret the divine themes of love, not specific determinations minutely prescribed. The divine themes are GIVEN as gift by God and then received back from us as gratitude precisely IN THE DIFFERENCE which our freely determined elaborations and renditions upon those themes constitute. Thus it is in the differences that we determine that we are in fact different from God in the only really important sense at all, personally distinct from God. So our gifts to God throughout eternity are not the blank slate of our volition void of self-expression and offered to God as the mere instrumentation for divine will (the sort Hart criticizes). Our gift to God is our renditions of the gift of his themes. That’s the music he wants to hear.]

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/18/2008 5:57:09 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 3/18/2008 8:09:01 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/18/2008 9:38:11 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 3/18/2008 11:06:07 AM (GMT-5)

So, D, what do you think of all these comments of Hart’s?

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POW, you’ve got Papanikolaou’s book. Have you read it yet? It’s pretty interesting. In reviewing that book, Lutheran Peter Leithart says in a review:

In his new Being with God, Aristotle Papanikolaou points to differences between Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on the issue of divine energies. For Lossky, the doctrine of divine energies is designed to “protect the real character of communion with God” in theosis while also insisting that union with God does not mean union with His essence. By union with the Body of Christ, one shares in the work of Christ and receives a deified human nature. But this reception of deified nature is followed by growth toward perfect, which involves participation in the energies of God. As Papanikolaou puts it:

“Personhood is the goal; the means are the energies of God conveyed through the person of the Holy Spirit. One assimilates more fully in personal existence the energies of God already present throughout the creation.” Lossky insists that theotic union cannot take place through union with the essence, but he also rejects “the use of hypostasis, which indicates exclusively distinction within God's being.” Further, to understand theosis under the rubric of hypostasis would be to deny the uniqueness of the union of divine and human in Christ. [Perfectly paralleling Ware’s 3 ways of construing theotic union with God.] Lossky writes, “Even though we share the same human nature as Christ and receive in Him the name of Sons of God, we do not ourselves become the divine hypostasis of the Son by the fact of the Incarnation. We are unable, therefore, to participate in either the essence or the hypostasis of the Holy Trinity.” Another distinction is needed to explain human participation in God - the distinction of essence and energies, the later being “forces proper to and inseparable from God's essence, in which He goes forth from Himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.”

Of course, Zizioulas disagrees, as Leithart’s reviews, just the point I found so interesting. Orthodoxy isn’t SO uniform in its explanations of divine-human relationality (as a comparison of Lossky and Zizioulas shows). In fact, Papanikolaou argues that Zizioulas’s is the newer view on the block. Zizy, he says, is “initiating a revolution of his own in contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology.” I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with either Lossky or Zizioulas. I’m just noting the disagreement over something so fundamental WITHIN Orthodoxy.

Oh well, just found it interesting.

Tom

Tom: I see NO way to ground the “difference” in creative expression, the “address and response” between creator and creature, the “unpredictability” and display of “inventive” creativity that shall define fully realized creaturely existence of which Hart speaks except in the creature’s free determination in “elaborating” upon the divine “themes” that God provides.

D: Then just apply this to FREE ACTIVITY of Christ-the-Logos' human "nous"..and it's "free obedience" to the Christ-the-Logos' divine nature.

Tom: You don’t get my point D. To participate in this sort of free activity (which is just the five points I posted on elsewhere and commented on—

·         non—divine centers of experience,

·          thinking, feeling, choosing beings,

·          self-determining/self-disposing in the freely creative expression of love,

·          self-perceiving in our apprehension of all of the above,

·          stand, in all of the above, in relationship to God)—

…is to be a person. But if the determinations of any particular such center of loving existence lie outside the divine will, then the center of experience which does the determining must be a non-divine personal entity, a non-divine subject or ‘who’. Now, perhaps the points I described really AREN’T constitutive of personal existence after all. In that case, being a person must mean something more than just these points. But neither you nor anyone else seems to be able to tell me just what that is. Personally (pun intended), I can’t imagine any activity, mode of existence, manner of perceiving or disposing of one’s energies in relationship to others that would constitute personal existence over and above these points. If you can, let’s have it.

D: I bet Hart does.

Tom: If after everything he said in the portions I posted of him Hart thinks that, then I think I’ll give up on a career in this stuff ‘cause I haven’t the brains for it.

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Tom: I just argue the person we become is distinct from the person the Son is.

D: Let's assume that. That our created human persons are absolutely and unchangably distinct from the person of the Son. Now, given epicletic living (baptism, Eucharist, etc), where we TRULY become one with the Christ-the-Logos, "spirit", "nous", and "body", by the transforming power of God's Spirit.. wouldn't this be an inconceivable oneness-in-differentiation where the Christ-the-Logo's Bride IS Christ...but also IS NOT Christ?

Tom: Yes, it would be inconceivable. ;o)

You’ve asked this before. You suppose one thing and then immediately suppose another which (in my view) undermines the first. If you’re going to assume a personal distinction between us and God, you have to DEFINE what a PERSON is (incommunicable, unrepeatable/unique, irreducible, free/self-determining, loving center of experience, whatever). THIS will limit what you can say epicletic living amounts to in terms of PERSONAL existence. However one we are with Christ, we’re not one person. But if you first suppose an epiclesis which reduces us and Christ to one person, then you can’t also suppose for the sake of argument that we’re personally distinct from Christ.

But tell me, D, what is there in the Galatians passage that makes you think Paul is speaking metaphysically AT ALL? Take me by the hand through the passage and show me how you get from Paul’s words to ANYTHING along these lines. Sure, there are lots of Orthodox dudes who use the passage that way. I’m asking for you to justify the application textually. If you can’t do this, then the whole application of Paul’s words “not I but Christ” to the questions we’re debating is out of place, as is the entire history of Orthodoxy’s use of the passage. It's hard for SOME to admit good people could be that mistaken about something for so long. I say, welcome to existence.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/18/2008 1:53:10 PM (GMT-5)